Sleeping eight hours a night helps you learn and protects your body

If you sleep for six hours a night instead of eight you’re causing damage to your body and reducing your brain’s ability to learn and perform.

Let’s split your life into two potentials:

Life A

- You’re half the size you should be

- Your heart beats irregularly

- You’re obese

- You have no skills

- And you’re going to crash your car

Life B

- You’re fully grown

- Your heart beats as a heart should

- You’re well proportioned

- You can play an instrument, you can dance, you can kill a bear with a toothpick

- And you won’t crash your car unless someone cuts your brakes

If you haven’t guessed it yet, ‘Life A’ is your six hours a night life and ‘Life B’ is your eight.

Sleep is important and if you’re anything like me — a busy bipedal ape — you’re only sleeping six hours a night and it’s deteriorating your body in a number of ways.

Matt Walker — a Professor of Neuroscience at UC Berkeley and author of Why We Sleep — went on the Joe Rogan podcast a few weeks ago and explained all the reasons why sleep is important and made me feel like a right fool for neglecting it so much in my life.

After listening to the podcast, I decided to look into all the problems a lack of sleep can cause in a serious attempt to scare myself into sleeping more.

I then decided it was my duty, as a proud member of our society who knew nothing of the destructive ways of sleeplessness, to share what I found and scare all of you into sleeping more as well.

What is sleep?

Before I get into the problems of losing sleep, I thought I’d explain what sleep is. Not in a condescending “it’s what happens when you close your eyes at night and open them again in the morning” sort of way, but in a scientific way.

So Matt Walker — the professor that upset me — said sleep is divided into two types, REM sleep (rapid-eye movement sleep) and NREM sleep (non-rapid eye movement sleep).

The former is known as dream sleep and the rapid eye movements that take place are thought to occur because the eyes are tracking mental images as the person dreams.

Walker says that whilst dreaming we all become flagrantly psychotic.

- You see things which aren’t there — you hallucinate

- You believe things that couldn’t possibly be true — you become delusional

- You are confused about time, place or person — you’re disorientated

- You have wildly fluctuating emotions — you’re effectively labile

- And you often wake up and forget the whole experience — you have a sudden bout of amnesia

His explanation for this lies in the parts of the brain that become more or less active during REM sleep.

The visual parts of the brain increase as do your motor, emotional, and memory centres. However, the pre-frontal cortex — which controls your rational and logical thinking — gets shut off and in Walker’s words: “it’s as though the prison guards are gone, and everyone runs amok”.

NREM sleep is the opposite of this as it’s completely dreamless. This sleep is split into three stages:

- Stage 1 — is the stage between wakefulness and sleep, also known as drowsy sleep.

- Stage 2 — is where your muscle activity starts to decrease and your conscious awareness of the outside world begins to dissolve entirely.

- Stage 3 — also known as deep sleep, is where the sleeper is cut off from the outside world altogether, responsive neither to sound or other stimuli.

After reading those explanations some of you might be thinking “I get the point of NREM sleep because it probably relaxes the body and recovers much needed energy for the day ahead, but what benefit does dreaming have on the body?”

The reasons aren’t completely clear, however, Walker does a good job of explaining why he believes dream sleep is so important:

“It’s metabolically demanding to have dreams in addition to this thing called REM sleep and whenever mother nature burns calories it’s usually for a reason, because they’re so precious. What we’ve learned over the past 30 or 40 years is that all stages of sleep are important…

“When you think about sleep as a state it makes no sense.

“Firstly you’re vulnerable to predation, you’re not finding food, you’re not finding a mate, you’re not reproducing, and you’re not caring for your young, on any one of those grounds sleep should’ve been strongly selected against.

“If sleep does not serve an absolutely vital function it is the biggest mistake that the evolutionary process ever made.”

With that in mind, let’s have a look at the problems you face when you don’t get enough sleep.

1. Stunts your growth

We all know the platitudes our parents repeated to us as children “eat your greens or you won’t grow” and “eat your crusts or your hair will grow curly” as though that were a bad thing. But one thing they never warned you against was the effect a lack of sleep has on your growth.

Human Growth Hormone (HGH) is part of the body’s endocrine system which is highly active in growing children.

You produce a steady flow of HGH during the day but when you hit stage 3 of NREM sleep (deep sleep) your body produces a large amount of it.

You also receive an increase in HGH when you exercise but experts estimate that 75% of all of your HGH production happens during sleep.

Not only that, deep sleep makes up a quarter of your overall sleep so if you are sleeping two hours less than you should be every night you’re missing out on a lot of HGH and effectively stunting your potential growth.

If you have children and you’re letting them stay up late to watch TV or play video games, tear their precious electronics out of the wall so they don’t sneak off and enjoy them in the night like I used to.

2. Causes heart problems

Recently I had a week where I only allowed myself to sleep for four or five hours. On the last night before I went to bed I chugged a pint of water and, to my surprise, my heart went into overdrive.

All night and the day that followed my heart was beating completely randomly, I was short of breath and had to frequently sit down because it was making my head spin.

After a few nights of proper sleep my heartbeat regulated itself and I felt like I’d dodged a huge bullet.

I did a bit of reading around and it seemed like the irregular heartbeats were a case of atrial fibrillation (AF) caused by a lack of sleep.

A group of researchers at the University of California examined three sources of data to determine a connection between a lack of sleep and AF.

People who woke up frequently at night had a 26% higher risk of developing AF than those who didn’t and people diagnosed with insomnia had a 29% increased risk than those without insomnia.

In this instance insomnia was classified as having trouble falling asleep, not having enough sleep or having poor quality of sleep.

As scary as having AF was for me, googling the heart conditions caused by AF scared me the most. For that reason, I won’t tell you what they are here but if you’re curious — and not a part-time hypochondriac like me — have a search for yourself.

3. Makes you fat

Animals sleep less when food is scarce and sleep more when food is ample.

The reduction in sleep not only gives the animal more time to hunt for food, it releases hormones to make it hungrier and increase its chances of survival.

This theory was tested in a study where people slept four hours a night for six nights to see if there would be an increase in their appetite.

The study found that when you are restricted to four hours sleep the level of leptin — a hormone which suppresses appetite — decreases significantly and signals to the body that it’s in a state of famine.

Conversely, the level of ghrelin — a hormone which stimulates appetite — increases and the person develops an appetite for high-carb foods.

The combination of the decrease in leptin and the increase in ghrelin levels can make people overeat and become obese.

I’m aware that this article is starting to get a little depressing, so from this point on I’m going to frame these facts as benefits of a proper night’s sleep as opposed to problems with a lack of sleep.

1. Learn skills quickly

An increase in sleep helps you develop new motor skills.

On Rogan’s podcast Matt Walker said that if you put electrodes on a rat’s brain and read the pattern as it completes a maze, you see the same pattern being repeated as it sleeps except at a rate which is 20 times faster.

Say you’re learning a martial arts technique and you practice it during the day, when you go to sleep your brain will play the sequence of that move over and over and when you wake up you will be 20 to 30 times better at performing it.

On this phenomenon, Walker said: “sleep is the greatest legal performance enhancing drug that most people are probably neglecting in sport”.

And it doesn’t just help with sport, if you’re learning a piano piece or you’re trying to solve a complicated problem, sleeping on it will increase your ability to exercise the skill exponentially.

When your brain tries to learn something complicated, it breaks the sequence into chunks to make it easier to understand. When you go to sleep your brain then sets itself the task of binding those chunks together to create automaticity.

The sleeping brain isn’t stupid either, it knows where the gaps in your skill learning lie and focuses on them.

According to Walker, the term “sleep on it” or “sleep on your problems” exists in almost all cultures except in places like France where the phrase is “sleep with your problems”.

2. Make less mistakes

Not only will you be better able to perform the skills you’re learning, you’ll also avoid making as many mistakes.

When a school kid is low on sleep they make mistakes, are less productive, take longer to finish tasks and have a slower reaction time.

This problem extends to adults too. Studies have shown that sleepy workers are 70 percent more likely to be involved in accidents than non-sleepy workers.

In one Swedish study of around 50,000 people, those with sleep problems were nearly twice as likely to die in a work-related accident than those without.

This brings us onto driving drowsy. According to research from the AAA foundation for Traffic Safety, missing just two hours of sleep a night nearly doubles your risk of getting into a car crash.

In a statement the executive director of the AAA foundation said: “Our new research shows that a driver who has slept for less than five hours has a crash risk comparable to someone driving drunk.”

You might as well down a bottle of whisky before you drive if you’re willing to do it on low sleep, you’ll be just as likely to crash but at least it’ll be less painful.

Conclusion

Well there you have it, I hope I’ve convinced some of you that having a good night’s sleep can significantly improve your mind and body.

Every time you deny yourself the chance to have a good night’s sleep because you want to watch one more episode of a show on Netflix just be aware of the risks.

There are lots of other problems caused by a lack of sleep that I haven’t mentioned here and I’m sure more will be discovered as research into sleep continues.

Sleep well, learn well, live well and drive safe.

I want to thank Professor Matt Walker for shedding a light on the adverse effects of sleep deprivation and for scaring me into investigating the consequences.

I will be sleeping longer and sounder thanks to you.